Don’t Get Too Excited About Bike to Work Day

CityLab) It’s time to think less about commuting and more about making all those other common everyday trips safer. Andrew Small 8:50 AM ET Don’t Get Too Excited About Bike to Work Day It’s time to think less about commuting and more about making all those other common everyday trips safer. In most cities across… [Read More]

It’s time to think less about commuting and more about making all those other common everyday trips safer.

Don’t Get Too Excited About Bike to Work Day

It’s time to think less about commuting and more about making all those other common everyday trips safer.

In most cities across the United States, today is Bike To Work Day—where bike advocacy organizations hold ride meetups, hand out swag, and generally elevate the gaunt and sweaty profile of the humble bike commuter. These characters have been proliferating in U.S. workplaces recently: Since 2000, the number of Americans who pedal to their jobs has grown 51 percent across the country. The trend is even more pronounced in the nation’s 70 largest cities, where their two-wheeled ranks have swelled 82 percent.

But there’s a hidden peril in Bike To Work Day. Now that the bike has come into its own as a useful player in urban transportation, city planners would do well to remember the other reasons that normal people bike: It’s fun, and a convenient way to get to places other than your job.

“Bike To Work Day makes many trips other than bike commuting visible,” says Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists, which started the holiday in 1956 (in tandem with Bike Month and Bike Safety Week campaigns) just as the post-war auto boom was making roads more dangerous for cyclists. “It’s a great way for cities to point to the other people who normally make more casual trips. It raises awareness, even if maybe not everyone is going to become a full-fledged bike commuter.”

Over the past few years, the League of American Bicyclists has leaned on bike commute numbers gathered by the American Community Survey as a way to rank cities based on who bikes to work (the Census Bureau’s Journey to Work measure reaches as far back as the 1960s in some iteration or another.) The League also ranks bicycle facilities and amenities to award bicycle-friendly status to cities and businesses. Here’s what their current top ten looks like.